About
It was not designed by a software company with a theory about cleaning. It came out of a residential cleaning business trying to fix its own pricing, because getting it wrong was costing us money every week.
We knew how to clean houses and we had a decent instinct for what things should cost. What we did not have was any way to check ourselves.
When a job went badly, we could not tell whether the estimate was wrong, the crew was slow, the house was unusual, the first clean was worse than it looked, or a discount had quietly taken the job below water. All five feel identical afterward. So the same mistakes kept happening, because nothing in the process caught them.
Most wanted bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage, and maybe a general dirtiness level. Fast, and silent about where the labor actually goes. Two homes can carry the same headline numbers and need very different amounts of work, and none of those tools had a way to say so.
Walk time. Room engagement percentages. Layered difficulty factors. On paper it looked serious. In an actual walkthrough it fell apart, because two managers could score the same bathroom differently and produce different prices for the same house. That is not precision. It is the appearance of precision, which is worse, because you trust it.
What worked was neither the simple version nor the complicated one. It was what remained after we removed every input two reasonable people could disagree about and kept every observable fact that actually moved the labor.
We kept the details that actually change the labor and cut the ones two people would score differently.
A kitchen and a bathroom are wet work. Chemical goes on, it has to dwell, then it gets agitated, rinsed, and dried without streaking, and none of that moves faster because your tech moves faster. A bedroom is mostly dry work. Two rooms can be the same size and still run on completely different clocks.
So we could not build this on square footage, and we were not going to build it on what felt about right. We went back through cleans on homes already in maintenance mode and asked how long a kitchen actually takes at 1,200 square feet, at 2,400, at 3,400. Then the same for bathrooms, bedrooms, living rooms, and the rest. What came out was a working range for each room type at each home size, taken off jobs our crews had already finished.
Later we audited it properly, comparing the labor each quote allowed against the total crew labor from the timesheets. We kept what held up and changed what did not. The subjective difficulty score came out, because it was the input people scored inconsistently. Observable conditions went in, because a manager can see grease and hard water without having to guess a number.
We run a residential cleaning company in North Carolina. It has grown to roughly $350,000 in annual revenue and completes more than 2,000 cleans a year, and every one of those jobs is priced with this method.
We are keeping the cleaning company's name off this site on purpose. It is an operating business with a phone that needs to stay open for its own customers. If you want to know more about how the method was built, that is what these pages are for, and you can always write to us.
Price Every Clean is in private preview. No public registration, no paying customers, no testimonials. We would rather say that plainly than pad the page.
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